Discharge characteristics of Single-sustainer driving in an AC plasma display panel

We investigated the discharge characteristics of conventional and single-sustainer driving for various pulses applied in an ac plasma display panel (PDP) through experimental observation and three-dimensional numerical simulations. In the single-sustainer driving method, bipolar pulses with both positive- and negative-going pulses are applied to one of the sustain electrodes while the other electrodes are maintained at ground. In single-sustainer driving with bipolar pulses, the luminance shows a higher value in comparison with that of conventional driving and the luminous efficacy tends to increase with increasing sustain voltage in accordance with the tendency of the relative IR (infrared) efficacy by positive-going pulse application. We performed a discharge analysis by using the spatiotemporal distribution of IR emission observed by using an image-intensified charge-coupled device (ICCD) camera and the density profile of excited Xe species through a numerical simulation of a PDP plasma discharge.